The Death of the Fact

People have greater access to knowledge today than ever before in the history of the human race, yet they increasingly isolate themselves based on their ideologies, fears and, ironically, television-viewing habits. This intellectual isolation has reached such epic proportions that I fear we are seeing the death of the "fact," and I consider it a turn of events that threatens not only our discourse but also our democracy.

I first started to wonder whether facts were dying earlier this year. I was sitting in the Hong Kong airport and watching Chris Matthews interview GOP presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, of Minnesota, about a number of topics. Bachmann had been in the news that week because she had claimed that, "now we have the federal government … taking over ownership or control of 51 percent of the American economy." Matthews couldn't resist jumping on the statement, noting that MSNBC’s fact checkers couldn't come up with anything close to that number. Bachmann flippantly replied something like, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, Chris, you have your fact checkers and I have mine. I think I’ll go with mine.”

If you know anything about economics or the structure of the U.S. economy, you know that the Representative’s comments were ridiculous (much like her fallacious attacks on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin just a few months ago). But the bigger concern is the accountability for these false facts. The glib answer that all fact checkers are equal is simply not an acceptable defense against bending the truth.

In the United States, politicians are frequently guilty of fanning the flames of this kind of ignorance by suggesting that there are two sides to everything, including facts. By doing so, they undermine the basic premise that there are pieces of information and data that are facts, truth without explanation. No debate. No hedging.

The times I feel most disheartened are the moments when facts are transformed into a flexible collection of data to be customized for arguments and are designed solely to make a point. These “facts” frequently reflect personal opinion rather than an objective and universally accepted truth, or what most of us have commonly come to know as facts.

Such an example is the heinous statement of Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., that has inspired an enormous public backlash and is a perfect storm of misogyny and ignorance. Akin’s horrific contention that a woman’s body in the case of “legitimate rape” has “ways to try to shut the whole thing down” is both offensive and wrong. A sixth-grader knows more about human biology than a member of Congress deciding national policy, including science policy. It was a shameful moment.

I was reminded, however, that politicians aren’t the only ones playing fast and loose with the facts when New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman recently took fellow commentator and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson to task for his Newsweek cover story on why President Obama does not deserve to be re-elected. Krugman pointed out that Ferguson got several key facts wrong and was misleading readers. Ferguson challenged Krugman’s contention, but by then the dispute had prompted a firestorm of criticism of Ferguson and Newsweek’s poor fact-checking. (Newsweek later admitted it didn’t have a fact-checking department.)

The incident gives me pause. The health of the fact—and fact checking, as well, it appears--is in serious decline these days because the abuse of facts is so widespread. With impunity, political leaders, commentators and elected officials rattle off facts to support their positions, and only later do we learn that they were not only wrong, but that they made up the so-called “facts”. The public shows little interest in digging deeper to know the truth, and many citizens are easily satisfied with parroting back the false statements of their favorite radio commentator or political leader.

Entertainer and comedian Stephen Colbert describes this kind of behavior as “truthiness,” the phenomenon where individuals need not seek facts or reality to back up their arguments but rather rely on their gut to determine what is real and what is not. They basically stretch the boundaries of believability by anointing a gut-inspired “fact” as the truth, and most often the public believes them.

PolitiFact, the website that checks the statements of politicians, organizations and elected officials, as well as fact-checking operations at some of the nation’s newspapers and television networks, has taken on the 24-7 duty of trying to keep politicians honest. The staffers research and evaluate the arguments presented by political leaders and organizations, and they post their conclusions on whether the statements are true are false. I consider this to be a public service, especially when trying to divine whether candidates are speaking the truth about complex government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

We are certainly well beyond Kant’s age of enlightenment, and possibly what we are experiencing today is a truly postmodern era. Maybe Jacques Derrida is laughing at us from his grave. But I think there is more to it than this. As individuals, we grow less and less concerned with seeking facts than seeking what we want to believe or what supports our opinion. In the era of open-source sharing, anyone can set up or edit a Wikipedia page, cite questionable sources or air unsubstantiated information, it behooves us to seek the truth and to elevate facts and not let them fall victim to the whims of an intellectually bankrupt election season where the loudest beats out the truest.

What will it mean for society if or when the fact dies? All we can do is speculate; there are no facts about it, of course. If there is no objective measure to guide our decisions, if there are no facts that can be counted among our arguments, the weight of our argument is diminished. If everyone has their own facts, slightly tweaked to reflect their position, then there is no true north for decision-making and everything, even the most basic information, is subjective.

The Internet allows for the constant updating of “facts” by the minute, and we have come to expect softness in facts where we used to rely on their rigidity. In a Wikipedia world, the stodgy fact is a dated notion, yet I would argue that it is more vital today than at any time in our past. The fast-pace of change, whether in science, technology or politics, demands that we search even more diligently for the facts. Carelessness with the facts and the truth in pursuit of an argument, a sale or an elected office diminishes us all.